Skywatch at Matoaca Middle

We had a great crowd of about 50-60 students and parents, last night, March 2, with a perfect night for star gazing. Ray Moody, Madhup Rathi, and myself (Terry Barker) used our telescopes to show off the Moon, Venus M42, and a few double stars. We started off inside the school, where Madhup gave a Powerpoint presentation of what we were going to be looking at. This gave the kids something to anticipate before heading outside.

This is an image of an area in the Hyades that I read about recently, and gives a great view at low power in a telescope–the top of the “house” in particular. It shows three double stars in the image–even though one of the doubles is actually just a visual double–not a binary. It’s the one labelled 75 at the peak.

Even though the crowd has mostly younger students, one 11 year old boy surprised me by asking me about our galaxy’s black hole being in the direction of Sagittarius. And he’d read about the New Horizons spacecraft mission. Something good is going on at that school.

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Solar Eclipse 2017

The big event of 2017 is going to be a total solar eclipse on Aug. 21. It’s the first total solar eclipse visible from the continental United States in nearly four decades. But, it’s only going to be visible in certain locations. the web sitespace.com has a very nice video of where you’ll be able to see it.

For us Virginians, that means travel to Tennessee, far western N. Carolina, or S. Carolina.